~/hogan-incubator $ ./apply --cohort=01
The job market said no.
Build anyway.
A free, fully-remote incubator for people building their first company with no cash, no connections, and no seat at YC or Antler. We put in nothing up front — and we take nothing unless you raise real money.
Rolling applications · fully remote, anywhere · no relocation, ever
01 · WHY THIS EXISTS
Every entry-level door got harder to open. So we're building a different one.
The junior tech job that used to be the safe first step is disappearing under AI-driven hiring cuts, right as more people than ever are trying to start something of their own. Most of them have never had a mentor, a cloud budget, or a single structured deadline. That's the gap this incubator sits in.
−46%
UK digital & IT graduate hiring, 2024/25 vs the year before
+60%
more new European founders in 2025 than in 2023 — a record
02 · THE PROGRAMME
Four stages. No stage costs you anything.
Everything runs online. There's no office to move near and no curriculum you pay to unlock — just an increasingly small, increasingly serious group of people still building.
00
Stage Zero — prove it, don't pitch it
Two weeks, open to anyone, no application form. Ship one small, real thing in public. This is the only "interview" — a pitch deck has never told us who's going to show up in week six.
01
Cohort — twelve weeks, fully remote
Structured weekly curriculum, mentor office hours, teams of one to four. You keep your job, your degree, or your other startup running alongside it — this is built around a life you already have, not instead of one.
02
The Metronome — one update, every Sunday
A single milestone check-in, due 5pm each Sunday, visible to the whole cohort. It's how momentum gets seen instead of guessed at — and how we make room for teams that are still moving when others go quiet for good. Life happens, so the rule has one written exception: every team gets one no-questions-asked pause per cohort. Two silent weeks is an exit; one hard fortnight is not.
03
Demo Day — in front of people who came for this
You present to investors who specifically asked to see a cohort that shipped every week for three months — not a room of strangers judging a five-minute pitch cold.
03 · THE STACK
Cash we don't have. Credit we can get you.
We can't write you a cheque. We can get every team applying directly to the cloud and AI credit programmes that would otherwise take months of cold outreach to even find — using your own company's accounts, not ours.
Honest numbers, checked August 2026: £6,000–8,000 of the stack below is claimable by any UK team with a company email in week one, no investor required. The six-figure tiers exist — but they unlock when you raise from a recognised fund or come through a partnered programme, which is exactly the door Demo Day is built to open.
The playbook — how to actually claim it
Every name links to the programme's own page. Offers change monthly; that page is the truth, not ours. Rule one for all of them: apply with your company-domain email, not Gmail.
| Programme | What you can get | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| AWS Activate | $1,000 self-serve (Founders tier), 12-month validity. $100k–$300k tiers exist for teams with a recognised accelerator or VC. | The big tiers need a partner Org ID — bootstrapped teams start at $1k, and that's fine. |
| Microsoft for Startups | $5,000 Azure self-serve: $1,000 on sign-up, $4,000 after business verification. | Changed July 2025 — the old $150k no-investor tier is gone, and credits expire in 270 days. Spend deliberately. |
| Google for Startups Cloud | $2,000 (12 months) on the no-funding tier. Up to $200k over two years once you're backed; up to $350k for AI-first funded teams. | Needs a company domain email and an actual product in motion. |
| NVIDIA Inception | Free membership: training credits, engineering resources, hardware discounts, investor visibility. | It's a membership, not a cheque — no blanket GPU grant. |
| Cloudflare | Startup programme covers paid plans for a year; the free tier alone carries most pre-launch products. | Programme terms shift — check the current cohort criteria. |
| GitHub | Free org tier is genuinely enough at this stage; the startup programme adds Enterprise seats for a year. | The startup programme wants a partner affiliation. |
| MongoDB Atlas | Atlas credits — typically $500 self-serve, more through partner programmes. | Credits, not cash; the free cluster may be all you need for months. |
| Notion | Up to 6 months of paid plans free with a partner code. | Without a code the offer shrinks — ask; codes are everywhere. |
Free AI tokens
| Programme | What you can get | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| Anthropic startup programme | Up to $25,000 in Claude API credits; rolling applications judged on traction. | Backing helps but isn't strictly required — a shipped product with users is your application. |
| OpenAI for Startups | $2,500–$50,000 depending on route. | Mostly gated behind partner VCs and selective cohorts — the hardest of these for bootstrapped teams. |
| Mistral & Together AI | ~€30k (Mistral) and $15k–$50k (Together) programmes, no VC required. | Small, competitive cohorts — apply with evidence, not intentions. |
| Voice-specific: Deepgram / AssemblyAI | Up to $100k–$150k for products built on voice. | Only relevant if audio is your product — but if it is, start here. |
Real money — UK routes, no equity taken
Start Up Loans (British Business Bank): £500–£25,000 per founder, up to £100,000 per business, fixed 7.5% over 1–5 years, plus 12 months of free mentoring. The honest catch: it's a personal loan — you carry it even if the company dies. Borrow what a plan can repay, not what the ceiling allows.
Innovate UK: the old Smart Grants have been paused since January 2025. What runs now is Growth Catalyst — including an Early Stage: New Innovators strand for small teams in critical technologies. Check the live competition list, not old blog posts.
The King's Trust Enterprise Programme: if you're 18–30, free courses, mentoring and funding support to launch — one of the most under-used routes in the country.
R&D tax relief: if you're building genuinely new technology through a UK company, a meaningful slice of that spend can come back — even pre-revenue. Talk to an accountant before your first year-end, not after.
SEIS is why UK angels write £10k–£50k cheques: 50% income-tax relief on up to £250,000 per company makes early UK equity unusually cheap for investors. Not a grant — but it's the context for every early conversation you'll have. And check your university: most run enterprise funds and awards for students and recent alumni that almost nobody applies to.
04 · THE TERMS
The whole deal, in one paragraph.
We take a warrant for 2–7% of your company — 5% by default. It only converts into real shares if you go on to raise at least £100,000 from someone else. If you never raise, you owe us nothing — ever. Not equity, not cash, not a favour later. No board seat. No veto. No vote. We only get paid if you do.
05 · FOR INVESTORS & PARTNERS
Three months of proof, not three minutes of pitch.
Every graduating team ships a public, weekly, timestamped record of what they built — before you ever see a deck. If you back pre-seed teams or want to put cloud credit and tools in front of people who are actually building, we'd like to talk.
Get in touch about partnering →06 · QUESTIONS
The questions everyone asks before they trust this.
What's the catch?
The catch is that we're betting on volume and patience instead of fees. We run cheap, take almost nobody's money, and wait years for the handful of teams that make it. If that math didn't work for us, we wouldn't offer it.
What if my startup fails?
Then the warrant lapses and you owe us nothing — no equity, no cash, no invoice. And you keep everything the programme gave you: the credits were redeemed in your company's name, the record of what you shipped stays public, and the skills don't lapse with the warrant. Most startups die; we'd rather you know that going in and build anyway.
Do I need a co-founder or a team already?
No. Stage Zero is open to solo builders. If you don't have a team by the time the cohort starts, we run a structured co-founder matching process rather than leaving it to a hackathon coin-flip.
Do I have to relocate, or quit my job or degree?
No. Everything runs remotely, and the whole format assumes you have a job, a degree, or another commitment running alongside it. Weekly, not full-time, is the design.
Is a warrant instead of shares normal?
It's the same structure Founder Institute has used at global scale since 2009: no equity actually changes hands unless and until you raise external money. It's the cleanest way to make "we don't get paid unless you do" contractually true rather than just a slogan.
Who's behind this?
Hogan Incubator is being built in the open by Ged Hogan in Liverpool — first cohort, no alumni yet, and we won't pretend otherwise. The legal entity behind it is Nexus Design AI Ltd (company no. 17264598). No cash ever changes hands, and every advisory agreement is a standard document you can have your own solicitor read before you sign anything.
07 · COHORT 01
Cohort 01 is open.
No forms to notarise, no deck required yet. Tell us who you are and what you're building — four fields, straight to us, done in two minutes.
Not ready to apply? One email when Cohort 02 opens. Nothing else, ever.
08 · YOUR DATA
What we do with your data, in plain terms.
What we collect: only what you type into the two forms on this page — your name, email, what you're building, and an optional link (application), or just your email (waitlist).
Why: to review your application and reply, or to send one email when the next cohort opens. That's the whole list. No marketing without asking you first, and we never sell or share your details.
Where and how long: stored securely with Supabase in London, with Nexus Design AI Ltd as the data controller. Kept while it's relevant to a cohort; deleted whenever you ask.
On this site: no cookies, no trackers, no analytics scripts watching you read this page.
Your rights: email gedhogan.tj@gmail.com to see or delete anything we hold about you. If we ever handle it badly, you can complain to the ICO.